1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for improving internet search results, and more particularly, methods and systems for generating a link title for a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) within a context webpage to be shown as a web result.
2. Description of the Related Art
The propensity of a user to click a hyperlink is highly influenced by the text associated with the hyperlink, commonly known as anchortext. Both content creators and search engines have constantly exploited this fact to attract more user clicks. Content creators tend to provide hyperlinks with meaningful anchortext to make intra-site navigation convenient for the user. The hyperlinks and their anchortext are commonly used by web search algorithms for ranking purposes.
The task of assigning link titles is rather simple for content creators because creators presumably understand the topology of their own site and use content-management systems to cope with scale. A search engine, on the other hand, is faced with the challenging task of automatically providing the right ‘title’, which is referred to herein as the link title or quicklink, and a summary, so that users are persuaded to click on the search result. Providing an appropriate title is extremely important as eye-tracking studies have shown that search engine users focus a lot of their attention on the link title of the results, paying even more attention to the link title than to the summary provided along with the result.
It is in this context that embodiments of the invention arise.